What might your Fairy Tale be telling you?

I ask a question in this week's episode of the podcast, and I wanted to come back to it here because, well, ten minutes isn’t really enough for such a big topic...

If there was a fairy tale from your childhood that has stayed with you - what would it be?

One of mine is Little Red Riding Hood.

I've sat with this one for years, and what I keep finding underneath it is a fear of being lost (I’ve done a LOT of work on this), and something else too: a visceral, bodily reaction to things that present themselves as one thing and reveal themselves as another.

When someone isn't being honest about what they're really feeling - or who they truly are - my nervous system knows before my mind does. I've come to think that sensitivity is part of why I do this work - it's the same thing that lets me sense when there's something unspoken sitting under what a client is saying. As with so many things in life it’s a spectrum - at one end is something that can feel unsafe for me… at the other is sensing what could help others feel safer.

I don't think that's a coincidence, and I don't think it's unique to me either.

Why the old stories stay with us

Carl Jung surfaced the idea that fairy tales aren't just entertainment for children - they're expressions of something shared, something underneath our individual, personal memories.

He proposed that beneath the personal unconscious - the layer made up of our own experiences - sits a deeper, shared layer he called the collective unconscious, populated by what he named archetypes: inherited patterns of psychological functioning, shared across humanity, that shape how we perceive the world, influence our emotional states, and move us toward or away from certain choices.

We don't get to observe these patterns directly. They sit beneath our conscious awareness.

We only know they're there because of the symbols and motifs they produce - and in the stories that resonate within us.

That's the piece I find most useful, practically: it's not that we remember a fairy tale because we like its arc or its ending. A story lodges within us because some pattern inside it is already alive in us - a fear, a longing, a role we've been playing without quite noticing.

Clarissa Pinkola Estés picks up this same thread from a different angle in Women Who Run With the Wolves. As a Jungian analyst and a cantadora - a keeper of old stories - she describes her work as a kind of psychic archaeological dig, sifting through the buried layers of the female unconscious to find the bones of these stories again. I love that description.

She also tells us fairy tales were never really children's entertainment - they were instructions, passed down because a culture needed a safe container for truths too dangerous or too unspeakable to say plainly. From here we recognise that Cinderella isn't really about a glass slipper. It's about being made small, and about what happens when we finally refuse to be that way.

So what do you do with your fairy tale, once you've named it?

Firstly, and most importantly, you don't need to analyse it like a text. Not every line is ‘truth’. Simply approach it with curiousity, gently, without judgement or self-criticism - the way we try to meet everything in this work.

And then ask…

• What happens in the story right before the moment that stays with you?

• Who are you in it - and has that ever shifted?

• What would it mean to imagine a different ending?

This is exactly the kind of "being with" we’ll be exploring in The Field this season - not analysing our stories from a safe distance, but learning how to hold what they show us tenderly enough that our nervous system can actually rest with it, rather than staying braced against it.

The Field gate is open until 9 September. Find out more here.

And.

If you want to tell me your fairy story, I'd love to hear it - message me and perhaps it will inspire some reflections for a future podcast episode.

Sometimes the story is that we are the Sleeping Beauty. Sometimes it's about the wall of thorns we’ve grown around us. Sometimes we’re the prince. There are no wrong answers, only the reflection of compassionate self-enquiry.